Small Industrial And Commercial User Demand For Electricity In El Paso, Texas

The focus of this study is small commercial and industrial (CIS) electricity consumption and its explanatory factors such as the price of electricity, natural gas, and labor; personal income per capita; the quantity of private capital stock per capita; and weather variables in El Paso, Texas from 1978 - 2017. The estimation techniques used are an Autoregressive-Distributed Lag model (ARDL) and an Error Correction Model (ECM). In the long-run, CIS customers in El Paso respond only to own-price and the quantity of capital stock per capita. In the short-run, CIS customers adjust their electricity usage in response to changes in all variables except for the price of electricity. The most unexpected result from this analysis is a short-run income elasticity of -0.32, indicating that CIS electricity usage decreases with economic expansion in El Paso, Texas